A Nightmare Dreary
by Ithil Aerlinn
Summary: A zombie fairy tale set in a world of nightmares. A young girl is sent to a strange land for being a witch, and grows up there to be joined later in her life by our favorite dark Trickster, Loki. Together they must conquer the demons of this world as well as their own. There is paganism contained within, as well as a M rating for gore and smut in later chapters.
1. Chapter 1: The Girl

_I believe in people lying_

_I believe in people dying_

_I believe in people flying_

_I believe in people crying_

_Keep living_

_Keep living…_

_(Lyrics from the song EXCESS by Tricky)_

Once upon a stitch in time, there lived a young girl that people whispered about behind closed doors, and told stories about in the dark of night. In their small mountain town, hidden deep in the woods far from frozen dinners, department stores, and the supreme ruling lust for the material, superstition and Olde Tyme religion still ran deep in the blood of the townspeople. Wives tales were taken as truth, all things were seen as a 'sign', black cats were avoided, and anyone who showed a preference for "difference" was shunned. This was why secrets and rumors abounded about the girl: how she could see things that others could not, seemed to know what animals were thinking, and when she was hurt she healed very quickly. The girl seemed to know about plants and what herbs helped which ailments just from instinct, and she could use the rocks around her…they said. The creatures of the farm and of the woods were drawn to her, because she could talk to them…they said. And in the small town of Sayvelm, she was thought to be a witch…and thusly she was feared.

In truth, the girl _was_ special, and she was not like others. Her grandmother, who had passed away when she was but a toddler, had been a healer, and not the kind who had gone to school for years to get a PhD. The old woman was feared, but respected for her ability to restore good health to even the folks that the city Doctors had given up on. Yet all her vast knowledge of healing with plants and herbs and crystals was not enough to cast a ring of protection around her grand daughter, from the suspicious glances of others. When the old woman crossed over, the girls parents kept her safe from the accusing glares and name calling. They kept her happy and blissfully unaware.

For people like to believe what they wanted to believe, and leave the facts alone. And so they did.

The girls knowledge of healing came from books that she read including journals left to her by her grandmother. At a young age she had learned to read, and from then on she voraciously tore through tomes like they were nothing more than grade school readers. She had a natural affinity for the creatures of the world and could communicate with them on a base mammalian level because she _empathized_ with them. It was not that she understood their languages, and heard them as she would hear any other person, but because she watched and listened.

People like to talk, and so talk they did.

The girl did not see things that others could not because she was psychic, but because she was very _perceptive_, more so than the average person, and with that perception came _intuition_. She was extremely intelligent, and believed in the mystical things, the powers of auras and colors and nature. In this way she was a magical child, just not the kind that the townspeople believed her to be. They saw her as the witches that stories of old portrayed, the kind that only existed in the imagination. The girl _did not _have a long wart covered nose, nor did fire shoot from her fingers. She _did not _wear a pointed black hat and buckled shoes nor ride a straw broom through the night sky cackling to the heavens.

She _did_ have haunting pale gray eyes that while beautiful to some, were terrifying to others. She _did _like to lay under the full moon light, watching the Luna moths as they flitted through the air, and listening to the hoot owls talk to each other in the woods. She _did _enjoy good music around a bonfire, laughing with her parents, and making up songs to sing to the skies.

She was different and that did not bode well with the villagers.

One a dismal night in March all things came to a stop for the girl. The Spring had been unseasonably wet, and there was a late snow on the ground. The girls parents were on their way home from shopping when their ancient pick-up hit a patch of slush and slid off of the Winter Bridge, where they were lost to the raging waters of the dark swollen creek rushing underneath.

The town constable showed up at the front door of the once happy cottage nestled on the edge of the woods. Her Aunt answered the door, and a mere three minutes later, the child's world fell apart. Grief crushed down on her like the weight of twenty boulders and for a long agonizing moment she forgot how to breathe. As her Aunt placed comforting arms around her to hold her when the tears came, the girl shoved her away and ran out into the freezing dark. She fled blindly into the dark woods, sobbing loudly, running as far as she could until a stitch in her side brought her crashing to her knees at the foot of a large tree. She gasped for breath, her chest hitching as the mournful wails echoed in the hills. That was were she cried until her small frame could take no more, and she fell into a dreamless sleep. That was where they found her in the early hours of dawn, curled up in a fetal ball on the forest floor.

Her Aunt had expected to find her dead, frozen to death or at the bottom of a ravine. But what she and the others found, was far more baffling. The girl lay under a tree, with a large jet black dog that no one had ever seen before. The dog was curled around her, keeping her slight frame from freezing in the chilling temperatures with the fur and heat from his body. As the townspeople approached, the dogs hackles stood up, and just for a moment his emerald green eyes seemed to shine with a hellish light. He growled low in his throat, showing white sharp fangs.

A lone man stepped forward and un-shouldered his rifle. "Dog's mad," he said.

"That's no dog!" someone else cried out. "Didn't ya see his eyes a glowin'? I will argue with any of ya that can tell me that isn't something straight from the pits of Hell!"

"It's her familiar!" another voice shouted.

The cries of "Witch!" and "Demon!" rang out into the forest, spooking bird and beast alike. A flock of crows, startled by the noise, arose from their perch in a nearby Ash tree and took to the sky, cawing and squawking. The towns people called it a sign.

The girl awoke to the den, the cold replacing the warmth of her furry companion. She rubbed her silver eyes as the sounds of the people shouting, crows screaming, and the dog snarling and backing away into the woods pounded in her ears. The man with the rifle had raised it again and aimed at the dog's heart.

"Stop!" she screamed, throwing herself at him. The shot when wild and merely took a small amount of skin and fur off of the dog's back. He ran into the woods away from the cruel people, and disappeared among the trees and brush.

There was no discussion as the people took the girl away. Her Aunt merely hung her head in cowardice, not fighting with the others who called the girl such horrible names and deemed her a product of _Satan_…a creature the girl did not even believe in. They placed her in an asylum in a large neighboring town, where she was kept nearly catatonic, the drugs inducing strange visions and vivid dark dreams...until one day, three years later….when she awoke.

The smell of pine and dirt was the first thing that registered to her senses. The next was the sound of birds in the trees and insects scuttling along the ground. The lack of light and a cool dampness began to seep into her skin, and she looked skyward seeing a dense veiling of low lying storm clouds. The air was thick. One of the birds screamed overhead, and she whipped her head around in time to see a strange two headed creature swooping down toward her. She threw up her arm and rolled away.

Everything she encountered here was odd, like nothing she had ever known before. The plants, the animals, even the air she was breathing seemed other worldly. As the day ebbed, the girl began to look for a place to sleep, a place away from all this strangeness.

It was nearly dark when she found it. The remains of an old stone cottage up on a brambly hillside. The roof was sagging, the door was nearly destroyed and hanging from rusted hinges. But there were heavy wooden shutters on the windows, and a dust covered table in the middle of the room. She heaved with all the might in her young body, and managed to turn the table on its end and shove it against the door frame. The ancient chairs broke in her hands when she tried to move them, and finding matches in a cupboard on the wall, she used them to start a fire in the round stone hearth. The smell from the moldy wood was horrid, but at least she finally was beginning to feel warm again.

There was a musty cot in one corner of the room. The girl shook out the blankets from it, silently willing any spiders to disappear, and finding none, she made a bed in front of the fire. Her heavy lids were just easing shut when she heard something at the makeshift door. A scratching…a low moan…

The shutters were drawn and latched, and she was too frightened to open one to see what was out there. More groans came from behind the cottage, and then a vicious growl and the table shuddered in the doorway. She shrieked, looking wildly around the room for something else to brace against the table. The one room building was very sparse, but a heavy looking cabinet sat to the left of the doorway. She pushed against it, but it wouldn't budge. The table shuddered again as something shoved against it, and the moans and growls intensified. Pure adrenaline surged through her body, and with the urging of her shoulder, the cabinet began to move. Painfully slow, she eased the cabinet, its legs scraping through the dust motes on a floor that had been unused for twenty years or more….and as she finally pushed the wooden beast home, the door of the cabinet popped open, and out fell a book.

The doorframe rattled as whatever was outside slammed into the table again and again. A putrid stench had found its way into the room, a smell like decaying flesh and rotten innards. The girl bent to retrieve the book, gagging at the odor of death long past, and then fled to the fireside, clutching the tome against her heaving chest. Her breath hitched, sobs broke free, as the stench at her door began to recede along with the moaning.

Nails or claws scratched against the shutters and what was left of the window glass, making an ear piercing noise akin to fingernails on a chalk board. She dropped the book to the floor and covered her ears, willing the noise to stop, silently casting protection around herself, tears streaming down her cheeks. She fell to the floor, back on her blanket in front of the putrid fire, exhausted, when finally sleep took her into its dark dreamless embrace.

The cold stone floor seeping its fingers into her bones stirred her awake. The fire had long since died, the sounds of the night gone. A dreary light seeped in through cracks in the stonework and in the shutters, telling her that it was day again. Hunger surged through her belly like a whip crack, and her mind traveled back to the book. It was bound in a strange wrinkled and age cracked leather, the pages a yellowed parchment. The words were written in pen and ink. It was the first line on the first page that grasped her attention : "This is a strange land, these Dark Lands. I shall call it the **_Other World_**, since I know not how I arrived to be here, or where here is exactly. I do know this, beware the night, as the dead are restless….and they are hungry."

The gnawing pain in her belly was forgotten. The girl sat back against the hearth, horrified, and proceeded to read what appeared to be a journal. She read with rapt attention until once again night claimed the land, and she sat in the dark, no fire, no food, waiting cross legged in the middle of the floor with her new found knowledge, for the dead to rise and walk the Dark Lands in search of precious life to destroy.

In search of her.

**A/N: Next Chapter is all Loki..I promise ;)**


	2. Chapter 2: The Trickster

_I believe in people walking_

_I believe in people talking_

_I believe in people breathing_

_I believe in people being_

_Keep living_

_-Lyrics from "Excess" by Tricky_

The door to the stone building was black as fine ebony, the pale fingers that pushed it open stood out like veins of quartz. No sunlight streamed in from the outside world…it seemed that there was never any sunlight here. No pure golden beams for this forgotten soul left to wander this realm in the dimness of half-light.

He had been a prisoner for what seemed like a lifetime.

Once he had been a Prince of a vast city made of marble and gold. He had led a privileged lifestyle, with all he lusted after at his devilish finger tips…and lust he did. Riches of the kingdom kept he and his family wrapped in the finest leathers, the best textiles that could be found in all the Nine Realms. The most succulent fruits made the wines that passed his ruddy lips…the richest honey leant its flavor to his mead. He had seen many a young nubile maiden in his bed, beautiful and willing creatures that would do anything he asked to walk arm in arm with a royal. And oh, how he thrilled in their bodies…but as any who has it all, he grew bored, and his tastes changed. Soon the beauties stopped coming to him…willingly.

Once he had been a magician, skilled in the ancient art of deception and the craft of the old ones, able to create any reality he chose. But the reality that had been revealed to him by the man he thought his father, the _ALLFATHER_, was not to his liking. It had burned him to know that his life had been a deception in and of itself. It felt as if his heart had bled a vile blackness when he found out what he really was. It had led to a fight, and a fall.

Once he had rode a flying chariot, his golden horned helm glinting in the sun as his monstrous army laid waste to a great city of Midgardians. Covered in the glorious armor of Asgard, he had taken his anger at the false father, and his disgust at the real one, his loathing of his brother the Golden Son of Odin, all out on Earth and its mightiest heroes. And he had failed.

He was taken away, called a _war_ _criminal_, a _terrorist_….called _Evil_ and a _Monster_. These latter two were things he already knew about himself, things he had found out the minute that he had held the Tesseract and felt the coldness of his origin pouring out of him. Midgard kept him for a time, imprisoning him within their facilities, their technology dampening his magic. Finally when the mortals had agreed to let him go, to be tried in the courts of Asgard, his false brother had returned him to the golden city….and Odin had welcomed Thor home with open arms. For his raven haired Jotun son he had only harsh words and more pain. For a time he felt as if he were simply rotting away on Asgard, his sentence one of public humiliations, floggings so severe that they left scars upon his ivory skin, and imprisonment in a crystal clear cage until he realized the error of his ways. The sentencing was swift and to him it seemed rather obscenely venomous.

One strangely fate filled day, Odin and Thor had come to see him. "Do you have anything to say for your crimes, Loki? " Odin's great voice had boomed. "Perhaps a regret or two, that you would share? "

Loki sneered, his rage not quelled; only incensed by the men before him. "I do, _Father,_ "he spat. "I regret not simply destroying Midgard instead of trying to rule it! Those pathetic creatures are not deserving of the rule that I would have brought upon them! "

Thor sighed and looked down to the floor.

Odin was grim. "This is unfortunate, Loki. A terrible tragedy…the heart of your poor mother-"

"She is not _my_ mother! " Loki screamed in a voice that was no longer completely sane. "Yet I loved her despite that, despite all your _lies_ _and treachery_, Old Man! She was always willing to show me affection, even when you were pushing me, pressuring me to be as Thor, your _true _heir! Speak not of _my _mother! "

Odin's face betrayed no emotion. He swiftly turned on his heal, his cape swirling around him as he exited the room.

"Do not do this, Loki, "Thor begged. "Do you not see the reasoning in this punishment? How can you be fit to lead when you think yourself above all others? That is not leadership. "

"That _is_ the mark of a king, you fool! "Loki snarled. "A king rules with an iron fist, he does not give in to sentiment…like _you _and your sentiment for the Midgardian whore."

Thor's azure eyes flashed a warning. "_You_ are the fool, Loki. " He maneuvered out of the room, a perfect imitation of his father. Loki was once again left alone, and enraged. He paced the floor of his cage screeching obscenities like a harpy, until he was certain he was wearing a groove in the floor and simply slumped into a corner exhausted, falling into a fret full sleep.

When he awoke, the prison was gone. Asgard was gone. In place of the shining city in the clouds, the city of glistening light was a dark dim landscape that mirrored Midgard….but was not. Ominous clouds loomed over the heads of alien birds and animals, chittering and squealing in the trees and dense grasses.

It would appear that once again he had fallen.

For a short while, his days were spent exploring his strange new prison. Always there appeared no pure light piercing through the atmosphere of this world. The plants grew low and shrubby, their stalks woody, their leaves a gray green. The trees were huge, stretching up into the dim light, their trunks gnarled and nasty, many covered in long thorns. The animals that he encountered were nothing he had ever seen before. Two headed birds screamed at him from the thorn trees, their crooked sharp beaks letting loose a most awful din. Often they were picking away at the carcass of something smaller, that they had skewered on the thorns. He had witnessed it enough times to make him avert his gaze anytime he heard the wretched beasts screeching. They would swoop down and scoop up what he supposed was a rabbit or mouse in their talons, fly up into the air, and then begin a spiraling descent toward the trees, letting loose of their pray. It would hurtle end over end into the waiting branches, the thorns almost seeming to reach hungrily to catch it…as if the tree were sentient. Almost.

After witnessing the acts of the flora and fauna of this odd place it seemed he was now forced to call home, Loki made a decision to stay in at night. Though he was a skilled warrior, he reasoned that it would be folly to tread upon these grounds after the sun_, (if the dingy ball hidden in the sky could be called that)_, had lain to rest. If the denizens of the day were so horrid, he could only imagine what night would bring.

Loki had found with delight that he had been returned some of his magic, and he thanked the ancients for that huge miracle. Though he could not for the life of him figure out how to use his powers to transport himself anywhere off this horrid rock, he used it to create a fortress to live in, carved right from the dull dark rock that he stood upon. His abode was cold, it had the liveliness of an abandoned cave…and yet it did not suit him ill. It mirrored his broken and bitter heart, a heart that no manner of magic could warm. Even though it lacked the comforts of home, a fire burned in the hearth, and he had a bed to sleep in, pulled straight from the woodlands.

He was benefit of being able to turn the plants he picked into edible food and drink with magic, and did not have to hunt down the denizens of the woods, or drink from the mucky pools that he found. Even what he supposed was to be deer in this world were putrid. Their musky rotten scent was enough to put anyone off, and their faces bordered on horrific. Their shaggy green-gray hair hung from them in disgusting clumps as if they were in a perpetual molt of mold. They ran on long scaly legs, their tails lifting to reveal a flash of yellow, to warn their brethren of the intruder, their heads held high. Great gray antlers sat atop the dome of their skull, furless and deeply browed. When they bellowed, it sounded as if they were being drowned, a wretched gurgling bugling.

He avoided them as much as possible.

Then came the day that Loki strayed farther than usual from home. As the brackish dusk faded into dark, he began to feel a bit unnerved. Like an interloper that had just been discovered…and in a way, he certainly was.

The woods that he had been traveling through quite suddenly ran out, and Loki found himself in a clearing. Ahead of him were ruins. He had seen something very much like it in his travels on Midgard, the humans called it _Stonehenge_. Massive boulders carved into humanesque shapes loomed in the darkness. There was something ethereal and oddly feminine about them that drew him toward the circle and as his feet past between the first stones, the air around him began to crackle with a brackish energy that made his skin crawl. He thought that for a moment he heard soft laughter, and the skin of his chest began to grow cold and tingle. Loki held up a hand, prepared to voice a short incantation that would light up the darkness, when a new louder sound made him halt and spin on his heel.

The noise came again, a slippery wet sound like two rotten fruit peels being rubbed together. Loki turned again and sounds came from all around. A mushy sodden din, in tandem with dry brittle crunching…He spun, breathing out words in Asgardian, (words that sounded to the great stones of the circle to be very much like ancient Norse), and the incantation emerged from his mouth, a silvery smoke that stroked at the air and grew into a light around him. For a moment Loki swore that he saw the boulders gyrate and heard them sigh in ecstasy as the air crackled…and his light fizzled out. Glaring at the darkness, he spoke again, louder, and once more his magic winked out. The god cursed under his breath, his teeth bared in a snarl.

A foul stench had begun to waft into the circle of stones. Furrowing his otherwise porcelain brow, Loki took a deep breath, gathered all the energy he could muster, and shouted the words once more…

And nearly lost his ability for coherent thought.

As a bubble of light seemed to ooze from his very pores and permeate the air, so did the moans of many rotting throats. Loki knew something was there, someone...but to be surrounded by so many without knowing was unknown to him. People were coming toward him from all sides…people who obviously suffered from some horrid disease that had made the flesh begin to droop and slip from their very bones. Some teetered on unsteady legs and staggered, barely regaining their footing before continuing on toward him, some drug themselves across the leaf littered forest floor by their gnarled fingers leaving parts of themselves upon the grass. There were women and men, all glaring at him with demonic eyes…but the worst, the worst were the ones that seemed to stare at him from dripping eyeless sockets. It made him think of Odin…and he bared his teeth again.

"Back you foul creatures and speak your peace! What business have you with me?" Loki shouted.

For a moment the mob seemed to be caught off guard, and they all paused for a brief second, a collective "Aahh," going up from their gaping maws. But just as soon as they had stopped, they began to close him in again. Taking a step back, Loki murmured and flicked his hand in the air, sending a hex toward the mob, with little effect. A few of the people staggered backward, as if caught in a gale of wind, and once again continued toward him. He cast another curse and another, but they did little good, and so he shouted at them, and snatched a worn branch up from the ground. Twirling it in the air and pushing all his magic into it, the gnarled bark became a polished shining war staff. It felt good to hold it, he realized, as it had been ages since he had held a weapon and faced off with those who wished only to harm him…

There was a sudden whishing sound and a _THUNK_, and one of the crazed lunatics went down with a strangled sigh, an arrow protruding from the back of his head. Another swish and _THUD_, and black ichor sprayed across the rocks. Loki narrowed his eyes, trying to see who was picking off these foul smelling gits, when a cold leathery hand came down on his shoulder. With no thought, the god swung around, lopping the head off the woman intruding upon his space with one go. The group of people collectively groaned again as someone sprang out of the darkness and landed on top of one of the massive stones.

"Stay in the middle of this cursed Circle if you want to live!" a scratchy voice cried out above his head. "And keep swinging that stick of yours at their heads! Always aim for the crown of the head!"

Loki snarled a high brow lip at the interloper, but heeded the advice given just the same. The figure was clothed in dark leathers, his head cloaked in a black hood. He sprang easily from boulder to boulder, picking off the deranged moaning and occasionally growling people one by one, and when all the arrows seemed to be gone, he jumped to the ground beside Loki, unsheathed a sword, and began to effortlessly spin this way and that, taking down men and women with ease. They slashed through bodies that were much too soft, sliced necks that gave way with a sickening squelching sound. They plunged their blades into eye sockets which held only gristle where tendons should be, and pierced foreheads with hardly any force at all. One by one, these putrid people, made crazy with some sickness that he had never before seen, went down…until the only two left were covered in gore and breathing heavily.

Loki stood panting, his back to the man who had come to his aid. A muffled voice quietly spoke. "We must go, there will be more coming."

"More?" The god spat. "Are they all this deranged and diseased?" He fanned his hand in front of his face, hoping for fresh air that did not come.

"There are always more," was the reply. "Do you have a house near here? A cottage, perhaps?"

Loki snorted vainly. "My fortress is a good piece from here, but we can reach it before dawn."

It was the interlopers turn to snort. "_Fool! _You strayed that far? You will never make it home alive. Follow me."

Loki bristled at the word. Thor had called him a fool one too many times. "I will do no such thing."

The figure picked a rough wool cloak off of the ground and donned it, shrugging. "So be it, but you will be as they are before morning." He kicked at one of the fallen with the toe of a well worn boot. "I am going home, where it is safe. You are lucky that I had decided to do a little night hunting, or you would be undead right now." He began to walk away. "The invite still stands. You may come with me if you wish to live. If not…it was nice fighting along side another with blood still pumping through their veins! Farewell!"

Loki arched an eyebrow and looked around at the bodies strewn inside the stone circle. "Undead?" he said softly to himself. He glanced back up at the retreating warrior…and began to follow.


End file.
